Habits: The Cigarette Diet

Beep. Tucked into a smoker's pocket or handbag, the small "Bellboy" paging device sounds. The smoker immediately stops whatever he is doing and lights up, interrupting his meal or stepping from his shower. A Pavlovian response? Posthypnotic suggestion? No. The smoker is so anxious to give up cigarettes that he is strictly following one of the newest and most unusual of the proliferating antismoking regimens.

To make the cure as painless as possible, the paging device initially beeps as often during the day as the smoker normally lights up, but in a random pattern. The patient agrees to smoke whenever it sounds.

Secure in the knowledge that he can always look forward to hearing another beep, the smoker can control himself between signals. But soon the friendly beeper — triggered by radio signals sent out by the telephone company — lets him down, slowly decreasing his consumption by four cigarettes each week. The decrease is so gradual that withdrawal symptoms are minimal.

Substitute Signals. The automated weedkiller technique was developed by Psychologist David Shapiro and Psycho-physiologist Bernard Tursky of Harvard Medical School. It was tried first on 40 people this spring. Not everyone was able to keep down with the beeps; one participant had a relapse after his wife, unaware that he had left his Bellboy in the car, drove off on a shopping trip. But of the original 40, including a telephone man who set up the beepers, 34 stuck it out until the system had cut them down to as few as four cigarettes a day. Some have even quit smoking altogether.

Shapiro says that the system works on the theory that smoking is a simple habit set off by "cues" — tension, ending a meal or performing a task. To break the habit, he explains, "we put people on a diet and provide them with a substitute for the old signal. The old associations have to be broken down."

The researchers plan to keep tabs on the participants to answer such questions as whether their beep technique can improve on the rather extravagant 75% to 80% "cure" rates claimed by promoters of other experimental methods. In any case, Tursky and Shapiro are confident that their technique has value, and hope to set up a program soon for dispensing the treatment more widely. Even if smokers have to use their beeper permanently, it should cost them substantially less than cigarettes.